Allen,
this is from the QNX.com website. Should we not all consider QNX to be our chief competition - or is this more hype than reality? Sounds like they've used lines awfully similar to WIND:
QNX is...
more than just an RTOS
QNX is...
a realtime platform
QNX is... open
(in all the right places)
In today?s competitive market, embedded developers need technology that is accessible, secure and reliable - technology that enables them to create innovative, feature-rich products. The QNX realtime platform delivers all of this and more, by providing standard APIs and tools, free access, open source to much of our technology, and open architecture. More?
Introducing the QNX realtime platform, the first integrated, self-hosted, graphical platform for embedded developers. Everything needed to create reliable, realtime devices - today.
As the world gets "smarter," and continues its push toward connected devices, the demands on embedded developers are ever-increasing. The race is on to provide reliable, feature-rich solutions to a quickly evolving, highly competitive market.
For over 20 years, QNX Software Systems has been serving the complex needs of the realtime, embedded market - needs like high reliability, hard realtime performance, sophisticated functionality, small footprint, and massive scalability.
Our experience and long tradition of innovation make us uniquely positioned to drive this new wave of smart, e-devices. By offering a complete realtime platform, with a full-featured, customizable GUI, an integrated suite of production-ready components, and an open, extensible architecture, we can provide developers with the leading edge they need to win.
Advanced, memory-protected architecture
Open systems APIs plus source for drivers and applications
Fully embeddable windowing system
Self-hosted development environment with industry-standard toolchain
Production-ready suite of customizable modules, including Internet and multimedia
QNX is... a solid foundation
Every platform needs a solid foundation. The QNX realtime platform is built on the QNX NeutrinoTM realtime OS, the most advanced RTOS on the market. The QNX Neutrino RTOS enables the design of highly reliable, scalable, and deterministic systems.
reliable architecture
With QNX Neutrino it all comes down to architecture...microkernel architecture, that is. The microkernel includes only a small set of core services within the kernel, including thread services, message passing, mutexes, condition variables, semaphores, signals, and scheduling. The kernel can be extended by dyamically plugging in service-providing processes, such as file systems, networking, POSIX message queues, and device drivers.
Each process runs in its own memory-protected address space, which makes QNX Neutrino inherently reliable. With so little code in the kernel to cause problems, kernel errors are virtually eliminated. And when there is a software fault, even in drivers and other critical programs, a QNX Neutrino-based system can intelligently recover - without rebooting.
Embedded systems developers can also rely on other reliability-enhancing features of microkernel architecture, including support for both software and hardware hotswapping, and the ability to distribute components across a networked environment.
fully scalable
Since only core services are included in the kernel, with optional processes plugged in to add functionality, the result is a modular operating system that's incredibly scalable. QNX Neutrino scales seamlessly from the leanest consumer device right up to the largest distributed SMP systems.
realtime performance
QNX Neutrino, of course, offers superior realtime response. With features like multitasking, threads, priority-driven preemptive scheduling, synchronization, and fast context switching (0.55 æsec on a Pentium III), the RTOS provides the serious realtime performance demanded by today's embedded systems developers.
QNX is ... well-connected
One of our greatest strengths is networking. Our full implementation of the TCP/IP protocol suite and utilities - including PPP, DHCP, NFS, RPC, and SNMP - makes it possible to run a variety of Internet services over a wide choice of networks. Using Ethernet or serial lines, users can connect to the Internet, the company WAN, log in to remote systems, exchange mail, run remote user interfaces, and more. What's more, TCP/IP for QNX can be easily scaled down to a small stack, suitable for tiny client-based systems, or scaled up to a full BSD 4.4 implementation.
QnetTM: seamless access
But QNX goes beyond simple networking. QNX Networking (QnetTM) is message-based native networking that gives you access to any resource, anywhere. Qnet features fault-tolerant networking, load-balancing on the fly, efficient performance, extensible architecture, and transparent distributed processing.
Qnet simply extends the QNX message-passing mechanism to provide the ultimate in flexibility. Under Qnet, messages are transparently transferred from one node to another, which makes it possible to access and use resources from remote nodes - seamlessly.
Qnet routes messages across the various nodes. From an application's point of view, sending messages to a local or remote server is the same. One node can easily access another node's file system, servers, hardware resources, and so on.
Qnet can also be configured to distribute processing needs across multiple nodes.
QNX is... a graphical environment
The QNX platform is the only realtime platform that features a fully customizable, embeddable windowing system - making it possible to bring professional, high-end graphics to even the smallest, memory-constrained device.
embeddable GUI
The Photon microGUI© windowing system is a high-performance graphical environment with an extremely small memory footprint. Its modular design gives developers the freedom to scale up and build feature-rich applications - like multimedia, Internet, and more - into embedded products. The Photon microGUI offers a number of technologies for creating high-end graphics applications, such as offscreen video, direct graphics mode, video overlay support, and 3D. Simply add or remove modules to scale from a tiny embedded system to a full-blown, workstation-class development environment.
easy maintenance
Since Photon was created with the same distributed architecture as the underlying RTOS, connectivity is built in. It makes little difference if customers are in the same city or on the other side of the world, developers can monitor and support them with ease. In fact, they can view and interact with any Photon application at any time - anywhere - using TCP/IP as the transport.
Internet ready
Whether a product needs to surf the web or serve HTML pages, QNX's leading-edge Internet technologies have everything developers need. If developers need a web browser, but don't want to spend the time or money to build one from scratch, there's VoyagerTM browser. Full-featured and scalable, the Voyager browser has support for SSL-128, as well as optional plug-ins and helpers, such as Macromedia Flash 4, RealNetworks RealPlayer 7, and our own media player for MPEG and general sound support.
multimedia ready
The QNX realtime platform includes all the necessary plug-ins to create the most complete and dynamic multimedia experience possible. The suite includes plug-ins for DVD with Dolby Digital AC-3, MP3, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, CD audio, and more.
Not only does the QNX platform feature an extensive suite of plug-ins, their capabilities are often enhanced when used with QNX. For example, processor-intensive, multithreaded applications such as DVD can deliver smoother, more seamless playback, thanks to QNX's fast context switching, priority-based scheduling, and other realtime capabilities.
QNX is ... developer friendly
The QNX realtime platform is the ideal environment for developing realtime, embedded applications.
the best tools
To begin with, the QNX platform includes the tools developers need to create high-quality, realtime, embedded systems. The popular command-line GNU development tools are included with the platform, as are graphical debuggers and third-party development tools. And, of course, since QNX Neutrino and Linux share the same POSIX APIs, almost any Linux development tool can be easily ported to and used with QNX.
Developers creating Photon applications can dramatically reduce the amount of programming that needs to be done with the Photon Application Builder (PhABTM). The PhAB visual design tool generates underlying C code to implement an entire user interface. PhAB saves time not only in writing the interface portion of an application, but in the debugging and testing stages as well. The end result? Full control over the user experience and shorter time to market.
With PhAB, standard widgets can be cut and pasted into an interface, or they can be quickly created with the widget palette. Built-in resource editors can be used to change text fonts, modify colors, customize bitmaps, and add callbacks without writing a single line of code.
choice of development environments
Unlike traditional RTOSs, the QNX realtime platform offers a friendly, graphical development environment. So, whether developers choose self-hosted development or cross-development, the QNX realtime platform offers an environment that's easy to work in.
developer-friendly architecture
The same UPM architecture that gives QNX Neutrino such unmatched fault tolerance, also makes it easier to add or change modules during development. Since every module runs as an independent process, it's no problem to add new features or enhance existing ones. Only the modules that are changed need to be re-tested, while the kernel and other modules remain separate and secure. So, rather than the days it may take to recompile, relink, and retest an entire runtime image with other OSs, with QNX Neutrino it takes just seconds. Developers can also start, stop, modify, or upgrade any part of the system safely and seamlessly, without a reboot or kernel rebuild.
In a conventional OS, subtle programming errors can crash the system without leaving a trace. With its full memory protection, however, QNX Neutrino not only prevents memory-access violations, but identifies which module was responsible - at the exact instruction.
custom look-and-feel
With QNX, OEMs have the freedom to brand their products with a unique look-and-feel. Applications can be easily customized using the PhAB design tool and our time-to-market source kits.
runtime friendly
With ever-changing standards, developers need to be able to dynamically upgrade and maintain products in the field. With QNX, they can upgrade new features or fix problems on the fly, even remotely, without interrupting service. For example, users can download new software or replace existing software themselves. Or the device could be programmed to update itself without the user being involved at all. Either way, there's no downtime.
¸ 2000, QNX Software Systems Ltd.
QNX, Photon microGUI, and Neutrino are registered trademarks, and IAT,
FLEET, FTL, In-Hand, PhAB, Phindows, PhinX, Qnet, and Voyager are trademarks, of QNX Software Systems Ltd. All other trademarks belong to their respective owners. |
